Storage virtualization is the process of representing one kind of storage with a different kind. For example, a hypervisor may group together five disk drives and represent data across the five disk drives in one virtual disk drive so that the five disk drives are used in parallel when reading the data. Thus, the aggregate system may seem to operate faster than any one actual disk drive. The hypervisor may store the contents of a virtual disk in a hard disk file, allowing that file to be mounted as a disk directly.